Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 01:05:34 +0100 From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se> To: Matt Sykes <mattmsykes@yahoo.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: recompile ports when update kernel/userland? Message-ID: <20020125000534.GA34297@student.uu.se> In-Reply-To: <20020124234549.23631.qmail@web21007.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20020124234549.23631.qmail@web21007.mail.yahoo.com>
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On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 11:45:49PM +0000, Matt Sykes wrote: > > tracking 4.4-stable. > > Should I expect a few ports to be broken after I rebuild > the kernel and userland? I guess I don't quite believe > that binary compatibility exists in the real world. > > I know that updating the kernel without updating the > base userland can cause problems, so it seems like I > should rebuild all my ports. > > If there is any chance that any port will be broken any > percent of the time, I'll just rebuild everything to be > safe. Even though a port may appear to be okay without > recompilation, it could fail in an unexpected way at > some point. > > But maybe this is not the case? > > What are your experiences here? > > --Matt Normally there is no need to rebuild the ports. Binary compatibility is quite good. It is not perfect but fairly close. Ports are actually much more likely to break if you upgrade some ports to the latest version without rebuilding teh rest of them. The Gnome stuff, for example, seems to be extra sensitive to this. It is generally considered a bad idea to upgrade just one part of it. Some ports are a bit more vulnerable than others due to their depending on the internals of the system. ( sysutils/lsof comes to mind ) Even for such ports there normally is no need to rebuild them when you update the system, it is just a slightly higher risk of something going wrong. The only thing you should keep in mind when updating the system with old ports installed is that you should remember to set the COMPATnX variables to 'yes' in /etc/make.conf This will install older versions of various libraries that ports might be linked to in case the version number of the system library has been increased due to an incompatible change. My personal experience is that I have updated my system in steps from 3.2 to 4.5 and I don't think I have ever had any ports break when upgrading the system. (I have rebuild all the ports several times for other reasons, though.) So, while there are no guarantees of nothing ever breaking I don't think it is wort the trouble of reinstalling all the ports just because you upgraded the system. Doing so will almost certainly take more time than finding and fixing any problems that might (but probably won't) occur otherwise. -- <Insert your favourite quote here.> Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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